Slavoj Žižek: The Urgent Necessity of a Syriza Victory in Greece

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Debt is an instrument to control and regulate the debtor, and, as such, it strives for its own expanded reproduction.

Critics of our institutional democracy often complain that, as a rule, elections do not offer a true choice. What we mostly get is the choice between a center-Right and a center-Left party whose program is almost indistinguishable. Next Sunday, January 25, this will not be the case—as on June 17, 2012, the Greek voters are facing a real choice: the establishment on the one side; Syriza, the radical leftist coalition, on the other.

And, as is mostly the case, such moments of real choice throw the establishment into panic. They paint the image of social chaos, poverty and violence if the wrong choice wins. The mere possibility of a Syriza victory has sent ripples of fear through markets all around the world, and, as is usual in such cases, ideological prosopopoeia has its heyday: markets have begun to “talk,” as if they are living people, expressing their “worry” at what will happen if the elections fail to produce a government with a mandate to continue with the program of fiscal austerity.

An ideal is gradually emerging from this European establishment’s reaction to the threat of Syriza victory in Greece, the ideal best rendered by the title of Gideon Rachman’s comment in the Financial Times: “Eurozone’s weakest link is the voters.” In the establishment’s ideal world, Europe gets rid of this “weakest link” and experts gain the power to directly impose necessary economic measures; if elections take place at all, their function is just to confirm the consensus of experts.

From this perspective, the Greek elections cannot but appear as a nightmare. So how can this catastrophe be avoided? The obvious way would be to return the fright—to scare the Greek voters to death with the message, “You think you are suffering now? You ain’t seen nothin’ yet—wait for the Syriza victory and you will long for the bliss of the last years!”

The alternative is either Syriza stepping out (or being thrown out) of the European project, with unforeseeable consequences, or a “messy compromise” when both sides moderate their demands. Which raises another fear: not the fear of Syriza’s irrational behavior after their victory, but, on the contrary, the fear that Syriza will accept a rational messy compromise which will disappoint voters, so that discontent will continue, but this time not regulated and moderated by Syriza.

What maneuvering space will the eventual Syriza-led government have? To paraphrase President Bush, one should definitely not misunderestimate the destructive power of international capital, especially when it is combined with the sabotage of the corrupted and clientelist Greek state bureaucracy.

In such conditions, can a new government effetively impose radical changes? The trap that lurks here is clearly perceptible in Thomas Piketty’s Capital in the Twenty-First Century. For Piketty, capitalism has to be accepted as the only game in town, so the only feasible alternative is to allow the capitalist machinery to do its work in its proper sphere, and to impose egalitarian justice politically, by a democratic power which regulates the economic system and enforces redistribution.

Such a solution is utopian in the strictest sense of the term. Piketty is well aware that the model he proposes would only work if enforced globally, beyond the confines of nation-states (otherwise capital would flee to the states with lower taxes); such a global measure requires an already existing global power with the strength and authority to enforce it. However, such a global power is unimaginable within the confines of today’s global capitalism and the political mechanisms it implies. In short, if such a power were to exist, the basic problem would already have been resolved.

Plus what further measures would the global imposition of high taxes proposed by Piketty necessitate? Of course the only way out of this vicious cycle is simply to cut the Gordian knot and act. There are never perfect conditions for an act—every act by definition comes too early. But one has to begin somewhere, with a particular intervention; one just has to bear in mind the further complications that such an act will lead to.

And what to do with the enormous debt? European policy towards heavily indebted countries like Greece is the one of “extend and pretend” (extending the payback period, but pretending that all debts will eventually be paid). So why is the fiction of repayment so stubborn? It is not only that this fiction makes debt extension more acceptable to German voters; it is also not only that, while the write-off of the Greek debt may trigger similar demands from Portugal, Ireland, Spain. It is that those in power do not really want the debt fully repaid.

The debt providers and caretakers accuse the indebted countries of not feeling enough guilt—they are accused of feeling innocent. Their pressure fits perfectly what psychoanalysis calls superego. The paradox of the superego is that, as Freud saw it clearly, the more we obey its demands, the more we feel guilty.

Imagine a vicious teacher who gives to his pupils impossible tasks, and then sadistically jeers when he sees their anxiety and panic. The true goal of lending money to the debtor is not to get the debt reimbursed with a profit, but the indefinite continuation of the debt which keeps the debtor in permanent dependency and subordination.

Take the example of Argentina. A decade or so ago, the country decided to repay its debt to the IMF ahead of time (with the financial help from Venezuela), and the reaction of the IMF was surprising: Instead of being glad that it got its money back, the IMF (or, rather, its top representatives) expressed their worry that Argentina will use this new freedom and financial independence from international financial institutions to abandon tight financial politics and engage in careless spending.

Debt is an instrument to control and regulate the debtor, and, as such, it strives for its own expanded reproduction.

The only true solution is thus clear: since everyone knows Greece will never repay its debt, one will have to gather the courage and write the debt off. It can be done at a quite tolerable economic cost, just with political will. Such acts are our only hope to break out of the vicious cycle of cold Brussels neoliberal technocracy and anti-immigrant false passions. If we don’t act, others, from Golden Dawn to UKIP, will do it.

In his Notes Towards a Definition of Culture, the great conservative T.S. Eliot remarked that there are moments when the only choice is the one between heresy and non-belief, i.e., when the only way to keep a religion alive is to perform a sectarian split from its main corpse. This is our position today with regard to Europe: only a new “heresy” (represented at this moment by Syriza), a split from the European Union by Greece, can save what is worth saving in the European legacy: democracy, trust in people, egalitarian solidarity.

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Slavoj Žižek, a Slovenian philosopher and psychoanalyst, is a senior researcher at the the Institute for Humanities, Birkbeck College, University of London. He has also been a visiting professor at more than 10 universities around the world. Žižek is the author of many books, including Living in the End Times, First As Tragedy, Then As Farce, The Year of Dreaming Dangerously and Trouble in Paradise.

All of it a total failure. They completely sold out the public with austerity and they've allied with Israeli imperialism. Stop pretending the advanced nations have revolutionary potential. The fact they would even try reformism shows they are unwilling to fight.

Posted by Jason Unruhe on 2015-12-01 18:19:59

Commie asshole Žižek! He is NOT going to be hungry, poor and bankrupt! Asshole probably get hefty pay check for this piece of shit article!

Posted by SuCAnderson on 2015-06-28 16:38:52

Unfortunately, the party has been purchased by the Kremlin. SYRIZA are also friends with Russian Fascist Aleksandr Dugin.

Posted by Stan Przhegodsky on 2015-02-15 17:54:39

The IMF is obsolete, but the irony here is that Argentina did abandoned tight financial politics and engaged in careless spending. Just because I'm paranoid doesn't mean they're not after me

Posted by boudu on 2015-02-03 16:05:50

Zizek's remarks about debt being used as an instrument of control made me think of my student loan (in U.S.). It is no longer necessary to build debtor prisons--the banks can make your life a misery and practically send you underground and off the books. I'm very interested to see how the Syriza/Podemos movements work out. I wish we had the same spirit here in the United States so that students wouldn't have to be indentured servants after graduation.

Posted by Nicole on 2015-02-02 10:54:10

the minimum wage in germany is at 8.50euros/hri urge you to get your facts straight

Posted by dennis on 2015-01-27 04:24:00

From the conservative UK publication "The Telegraph."

If I were Greek, I'd be tempted to vote for the Marxist

Greece is being broken apart by the euro elite and its people have little to lose

Well, I think the implication here is that it's the German government loaning the cash, i.e. the German citizen's taxes, that will not be repaid. It is in that sense that the German citizens want the debt repaid.

Posted by Herm on 2015-01-26 13:41:57

Yes, wonderful, give European states independence and everything will be alright. Last time we had that, WWII exploded. Before that, same situation, bunch of independent European states, WWI exploded. So, maintaining EU with USA as protectionist, is only possible solution. So, just keep the things as they are but in a political process social politics should be improved. Sooner or later, political elite, in a real democracies will do the job, just it is happening now in the US. It is a slow process but the only one. Nobody need revolutions since they make people more poorer. And take lives.

Posted by Milos on 2015-01-26 09:19:29

Mr. Zizek: Do you see the threats being made in Greece as being what actually happened in Egypt and to the Arab spring generally? That the "dark state" actually made life in post revolution Egypt so unbearable that an even more fascist regime reemerged? Is this what the bankers and dark staters will do in Greece now that Syriza has won?

Posted by ron b on 2015-01-25 12:28:05

Shouldn't that be German financial institutions rather than German citizens who want the the debt repaid?

That said the minimun wage to be introduced in Germany is 12euros/hr, quite a lot more than the Irish minimum wage of 8.65 euros/hr

Posted by tonyk on 2015-01-25 07:39:12

Thanks for share your information. Your information is very important to me and peoples….great and good post, thank’s regards…!!!!

No, it's the Germans who hold the debt, and it is the German citizens who want the debt to be repaid (and "sold" on the the repayment eventually happening), even though the repayment of the debt is a fiction (in other words, cannot and will not ever be paid in its entirety). That's what Zizek is saying.

Posted by Herm on 2015-01-23 13:33:15

Interesting. Shouldn't it be 'Greek' voters and not 'German' voters in para 10, line 3? Or did I miss something?

Posted by avionixon on 2015-01-23 11:06:17

The thought of such a "rebellion" is certainly attractive in this situation. Not only for many greek people, but also for people in many other, now economically enslaved countries, in this european "union".

But if everyone else keeps playing this same game, just greece says: no more, it will end really shitty for greece, a bit annoying for everybody else and that will be that.